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“No God! We are already overwhelmed!” I cried out. That was the morning of Tuesday, June 28.

For weeks I had been dancing and dodging… trying to avoid the truth: I was swamped.

Our family home remodeling project was now in its third year. When it began, the thought of re-doing the floors concerned me the least. I had done flooring before… what could go wrong? I learned the hard answer to that thought when I removed the old flooring and found a mess that added three months of unplanned labor (that’s me) and expense. (I spoke about this in the last letter for March-April.)

Hopes of relief from the seven days a week work schedule, between ministry and remodeling, had faded over those three months. Each day’s labor wore away more of the hope lingering from the previous day.

By that day in June I already knew that the bamboo flooring — just installed in May over the repaired subfloor — was warping. (While not pertinent to the point, the culprit is water vapor, the bane of wood flooring — and a breached vapor barrier.) Our flooring nightmare turned into Flooring Nightmare II. Now, much of the main area flooring must be removed and re-done.

What had begun as a labor of love turned into a black hole sucking the life from us.

Yet, our broken house was not the only, nor the greatest, challenge our family was facing. Continue reading